BPO: The Building Product Ontology for Assembled Products

With the current trend of using Linked Data to describe buildings during their entire lifecycles, the importance of product descriptions in a Semantic Web context is growing while most product ontologies are designed for mass-produced goods of little variance. But especially in the construction industry, products are often innovative and individually manufactured and previous attempts to depict them with ontologies failed to include meaningful alignments to already existing approaches. Thus, this paper gives an overview of existing product ontologies in general and analyses previous approaches in more detail to identify potential improvements that can be made. Based on this analysis, this paper presents the Building Product Ontology (BPO), including its concepts and alignments. To obtain a modular ontology, the BPO focuses on the non-geometric description without defining templates by determination of taxonomies and includes concepts to model assembly structures, interconnections of components, and complex properties and property values. The BPO enables manufacturers to freely model their products while still benefitting from the Semantic Web in respects of findability and availability of product data. By going through the given examples and demonstrations, inexperienced users are supported to apply the BPO and exploit its benefits.